I defend my attempt to explain causal priority by means of one-way causal conditionship by answering an argument by J. A. Cover about Charles'' law. Then I attempt to say what makes a philosophical analysis a counterfactual analysis, so I can understand Cover''s claim that my account is at its base a counterfactual one. Finally I examine Cover''s discussion of my contention that necessary for in the circumstances is nontransitive.

Myles Brand and Marshall Swain advocate the principle that if A is the set of conditions individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the occurrence of B, then if C is a set of conditions individually necessary for the occurrence of B, every member of C is a member of A. I agree with John Barker and Risto Hilpinen who each argue that this principle is not true for causal necessity and sufficiency, but I disagree with their claim that it is (...) true for logical necessity and sufficiency. The original appeal of the principle may be due to confusing two kinds of totality: to say that when every member of set A obtains, then every condition necessary for E obtains is not to say that every condition necessary for E is a member of A. All the authors mentioned believe that causal necessity precludes logical necessity. I deny this on the basis of an example from kinematics. Hume has not refuted definitions of causation in terms of logically necessary and sufficient conditions, nor have Brand and Swain. (shrink)

Hume's arguments for the contention that causal necessity precludes logical necessity depend on the questionable principle that a cause must precede its effect. Hobbes' definition of entire cause, although it fails to account for causal priority, is not refuted by Hume. The objections of Myles Brand and Marshall Swain (Philosophical Studies, 1976) to my counterexample against Hume (Philosophical Studies, 1975) are ineffective. Their other objections to my criticisms of their argument against defining causation in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (...) (Synthese, 1970) are also mostly ineffective. (shrink)

Ted Honderich's ‘Causes and If p, even if x, still q ’ contains many good points I shall not discuss. My discussion is restricted to some of the points Honderich makes about causal priority in the final two sections of his paper. He considers several proposals, new and old, for accounting for causal priority before he presents a tentativeproposal of his own. He thinks that some of these proposals, besides having difficulties peculiar to themselves, share the deficiency of lacking the (...) proper character. When we look for the difference between causal circumstances and causes, on the one hand, and their effects, on the other, he says, We are not pursuing any difference between these things. We arepursuing a difference of a certain character. What we are after has to do with what we say: that causes and causal circumstances make their effects happen , and not the other way on, and that causes and causal circumstances explain their effects , and not the other way on. (shrink)

Might something I do now make something have happened earlier? This paper is about an argument which concludes that I might. Some arguments about “backward causation” conclude that the world could have been the kind of place in which actions make things have happened earlier. The present argument says that it is that kind of place: that we actually are continually doing things that really make earlier things have happened. The argument is not new. It sees temporal direction as logically (...) independent of any direction which necessary and sufficient conditions may have and it sees causal direction as properly deriving from the latter. Thus the directions of time and of making things happen need not coincide and, as it turns out, do not actually coincide in fact. There are examples of events which are sufficient, in a suitably rich sense, for the occurrence of earlier events; hence they make the earlier events happen. My purpose in this paper is to lend support to the argument by filling in some details which ‘backward sufficient conditions’ may lay claim to. (shrink)

In the first part ("Determination"), I consider different notions of determination, contrast and compare modal with non-modal accounts and then defend two a-modality theses concerning essence and supervenience. I argue, first, that essence is a a-modal notion, i.e. not usefully analysed in terms of metaphysical modality, and then, contra Kit Fine, that essential properties can be exemplified contingently. I argue, second, that supervenience is also an a-modal notion, and that it should be analysed in terms of constitution relations between properties. (...) In the second part ("A Theory of Truthmaking"), I first review the literature on ontological commitment, and argue that the notion of truthmaking is better suited to play its explanatory rôle. I then argue that we should take truthmaker theory seriously, and that we should provide actual truthmakers for all truths there are. In the last chapter of this part, I review Armstrong's truthmaker theories and argue that they are unsatisfactory. I generalise my criticism to an argument against truthmaker necessitarianism, the view that truthmakers necessarily make true the truths they are truthmakers of. In the third part ("Properties and their Kind(s)"), I discuss qualitative determination. I present and endorse the truthmaker argument for universals, and defend universalism against friends of tropes, states of affairs and facts. I then give a novel characterisation of the important class of intrinsic properties, building on Lewis' work. With a workable notion of intrinsicness at hand, I argue that relations are ontologically – but not "ideologically" – dispensable: qualitative determination in general is a matter of intrinsic structure. In the future, I plan to add two parts and to publish my thesis as a book: In the fourth part ("Exemplification"), I argue for the existence of an exemplification relation tying universals and particulars together. I derive theoretical benefits from this relation by providing adverbialist theories of modality and tense and identify exemplification with a type of parthood. In the fifth part ("Qua qua qua"), I investigate the curious and interesting ontological category of so-called "qua-objects" (Picasso-as-a-painter, for example) and argue that they exist, are not identical with transworld indidivuals or modal parts and that they provide (contingent) truthmakers for all true predications. (shrink)

Recent attempts to fix the direction of causal priority without reference to the direction of temporal priority have begun with an analysis of the causal relation itself. I offer a method, based on causal modelling theory, designed to determine the direction of causal priority while remaining as agnostic as possible about the nature of the causal relation.

For a long time, regularity accounts of causation have virtually vanished from the scene. Problems encountered within other theoretical frameworks have recently induced authors working on causation, laws of nature, or methodologies of causal reasoning – as e.g. May (Kausales Schliessen. Eine Untersuchung über kausale Erklärungen und Theorienbildung. Ph.D. thesis, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, 1999), Ragin (Fuzzy-set social science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Graßhoff and May (Causal regularities. In W. Spohn, M. Ledwig, & M. Esfeld (Eds.), Current issues in (...) causation (pp. 85–114). Paderborn: Mentis, 2001), Swartz (The concept of physical law (2nd ed.). http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/physical-law/, 2003), Halpin (Erkenntnis, 58, 137–168, 2003) – to direct their attention back to regularity theoretic analyses. In light of the latest proposals of regularity theories, the paper at hand therefore reassesses the criticism raised against regularity accounts since the INUS theory of causation of Mackie (The cement of the universe. A study of causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). It is shown that most of these objections target strikingly over-simplified regularity theoretic sketches. By outlining ways to refute these objections it is argued that the prevalent conviction as to the overall failure of regularity theories has been hasty. (shrink)

While standard procedures of causal reasoning as procedures analyzing causal Bayesian networks are custom-built for (non-deterministic) probabilistic struc- tures, this paper introduces a Boolean procedure that uncovers deterministic causal structures. Contrary to existing Boolean methodologies, the procedure advanced here successfully analyzes structures of arbitrary complexity. It roughly involves three parts: first, deterministic dependencies are identified in the data; second, these dependencies are suitably minimalized in order to eliminate redundancies; and third, one or—in case of ambiguities—more than one causal structure is (...) assigned to the minimalized deterministic dependencies. (shrink)